That morning, one of the “Fox & Friends” headlines—quick stories that merit only a few second’s mention—was that “that salmonella outbreak” had become so severe that furloughed CDC workers were being recalled to help deal with it. My eyes widened in surprise. What? A salmonella outbreak? I had been watching Fox News for an average of three hours a day for eight days, and this was the very first I had heard of it. I was even more disturbed by the casual tone of it all, as if they had been discussing it for weeks, and I had just missed it. My first—and perhaps slightly fevered—thought was that the network had soft-pedaled the story because they didn’t want to give the impression that furloughing a bunch of agricultural inspectors might have been a bad idea.
It was at that moment that I realized that Fox was simply not telling me things—things that, arguably, might be good for me to know. Such as, just to pick an example, that eating a certain brand of chicken might cause me illness or death, and that the problem was sufficiently dire that government employees were being recalled to work without pay to deal with it. It was a very disturbing moment, and I immediately began to wonder what other matters Fox had chosen to keep me in the dark about.
Perhaps it’s time to discuss ignorance. One of the interesting things about Fox News, one of the things I hadn’t anticipated upon entering into this venture, was how little actual news the network disseminates. There is a lot of national political coverage, most of this devoted to the damage that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are inflicting on our country. Beyond that, however, Fox stays true to its Rupert Murdochian tabloid roots. There is plenty of coverage of police chases and freak accidents, but very little else in the way of substantive stories.
Given the statistics about Fox’s conservative influence and the way it misleads its viewers, I think it is fair to classify much of what it does as propaganda. My liberal cynicism seemed to render me immune to that — their O’Reilly-style hectoring eliciting a few laughs, but doing little to change my worldview. But Fox, as I came to discover, indulges in another form of opinion creation. Let’s call this the propaganda of ignorance. By choosing which stories to cover, and, perhaps more important, which stories to ignore, Fox is able to advance its political agenda in a much more subtle and insidious way.
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/28/my_personal_fox_news_nightmare_inside_a_month_of_self_induced_torture/
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